In his Meditations René Descartes launched what is known as the Enlightenment project. This project aimed at basing all knowledge-claims on rational grounds that are universally acceptable to everybody. This project is characterised by two important features. First, it is exclusively a cognitive project. Descartes aspired to make some solid and lasting contribution to knowledge. Secondly it is a critical project. It aims at basing all knowledge claims on universally acceptable rational grounds and to eliminate claims that cannot be derived from such grounds. This project became characteristic of Enlightenment culture and gave rise to the flowering of scientific enquiry.
However, this project also became the mindset of the intellectual culture in the Enlightenment. The result was that the critical search for knowledge became paradigmatic for all thinking. In some way or other all questions in life were understood as cognitive questions. The central question in all thinking became: “How do you know?” in the critical sense of “On what grounds do you base your knowledge claims?”.
In the mindset of the Enlightenment, religious belief was often understood in purely cognitive terms. Like science, religion was aimed at providing us with knowledge about God, the world and ourselves. Religious beliefs were taken to be factual hypotheses, and the task of theology was to prove the truth of these hypotheses by showing that they are derived from universally acceptable rational grounds.
This was a serious misrepresentation of the nature of religious faith. Believers are not purely cognitive beings. They are beings who try to make sense of their lives and experience by interpreting these in terms of the heritage of faith handed down to them in a religious tradition. In this way faith is a hermeneutical rather than a cognitive phenomenon. It is not a kind of knowledge but a kind of interpretation of the things we know.
This paper explains the nature of this kind of interpretation in the light of G.K. Chesterton’s statement that “all good things look better when they look like gifts”. This statement illustrates three essential aspects of religious faith: 1. Faith is hermeneutical – good things are interpreted as gifts. 2. This interpretations requires a response: gifts call for gratitude. 3. Both the interpretation and the response entail assumptions about the nature of reality – gifts and gratitude assume the reality of a giver.